Showing posts with label Bram Stoker Award. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bram Stoker Award. Show all posts

Saturday, June 23, 2018

The Bram Stoker Award: Some Concluding Thoughts

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


As I mentioned in the first installment of this four- (now five-) part series, it's unclear how prestigious the Bram Stoker Award is beyond the Horror Writers Association (HWA), whose members bestow the prize to writers (often among their own ranks) for “superior achievement” in the genre. 

The prizes were first awarded, in a variety of categories, in 1987. Winners receive a statuette made by Society Awards, the same firm that makes the Emmy Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the GLAAD Media Award.




It's surprisingly easy to become a member of the HWA. As the organization's website indicates, “You needn’t be an established professional writer to join HWA. Your demonstrated intention to become a professional writer is all that’s required to join HWA at the Affiliate level.” “Demonstrated intention” is indicated by “one minimally paid publication in any of several categories.” There are opportunities, at various other “levels,” for several other types of membership; one need not have written anything at all for the “Associate level” of membership, which is open to “non-writing professionals with an interest in the field (such as illustrators, librarians, booksellers, producers, agents, editors, and teachers).” The question doesn't seem so much who is eligible to join the HWA as who is not allowed.




Nomination for the HWA's annual Bram Stoker Award, “an eight-inch replica of a fanciful haunted house, designed specifically for HWA by sculptor Steven Kirk,” is also an easy process, open to many: “any work of Horror first published in the English language may be considered for an award during the year of its publication.” Currently, “the eleven Bram Stoker Award categories are: Novel, First Novel, Short Fiction, Long Fiction, Young Adult, Fiction Collection, Poetry Collection, Anthology, Screenplay, Graphic Novel and Non-Fiction”—something, it seems, for everyone. To add yet another opportunity to win an award, the HWA recently added a twelfth category: “Short Non-Fiction.”




Any member of the HWA can nominate an author for placement on the preliminary ballot, and a panel of judges prepares a second preliminary “ballot” of potential winners. Then, “two rounds of voting by our Active members . . . determine first the Final Ballot (all those appearing on the Final Ballot are “Bram Stoker Nominees”), and then the Bram Stoker Award Winners.”




One should be skeptical of the value of a prize for “superior achievement” that is often awarded to the members of the organization who vote for the winner, especially when the contest is open to a wide segment of the population of published authors and any member can place a name on the ballot. Outside the HWA, how seriously is the Bram Stoker Award for Novel taken? Is the prize considered prestigious by anyone outside the HWA?




Obviously, the answers to these questions depend on the person (or organization) asked. Authors who've won one—or more—of the awards often boast of their “superior achievement” on their websites or in interviews and plaster their book covers with HWA badges. After all, one of the expressed purposes of the HWA is to promote its authors' works. Many successful horror authors are, after all, HWA members, and members pay dues. Therefore, the HWA itself and its author-members are likely to agree that the Bram Stoker Award is prestigious. Publishers, whose goal is to sell books, are apt to concur, as are other organizations, such as universities, with which a horror author may be affiliated.




On the other hand, fans (as opposed to groupies) are often a lot less impressed with the award; many a Bram Stoker Award winner's prize-winning novel has received low ratings on Amazon and other book-selling websites, and, as we've seen in previous posts, book reviewers and literary critics are often unswayed in their opinions of books and authors by the fact that a writer is a Bram Stoker Award winner. What matter to readers, reviewers, and critics is the reading experience and the quality of the book, not an award by a professional organization to which many of the award winners belong. If readers consider a book to be a stinker, its having won an award won't matter. For a literary critic, such as Harold Bloom, whose disdain for Stephen King is widely known, no number of such awards is going to change his or her mind about the quality and value of the award-winner's work or of horror fiction in general.




Die-hard fans and groupies, for whom a favorite author can do no wrong, are going to love a writer no matter what; whether he or she happens to have been awarded a prize isn't going to have much of an effect on such followers, so, for them, the Bram Stoker Award also isn't likely to matter much one way or the other.

The unavailability of the criteria by which the Bram Stoker Award is awarded also leaves the matter of its prestige open to question. The HWA doesn't publish the criteria its judges use to determine what constitutes “superior achievement,” so there's no meaningful basis for agreeing or disagreeing with their awarding of the prize to any particular author. The awarding of the award is merely a consensus of opinion based on who-knows-what?




Why has Stephen King, one of the most prolific and profitable authors of horror (or any other genre), with 350 million book sales, won no fewer than six Bram Stoker Awards, while his colleague and fellow HWA member, Dean Koontz, also a prolific and highly successful author of horror and dark fantasy, with 450 million book sales to his credit, has never won a single such award? Popularity cannot be equated with quality, of course, but is it really realistic to suppose that Koontz, who's been nominated three times for the award, has never once, in a career spanning half a century, demonstrated “superior achievement” in the writing of a horror novel, while, according to the HWA, King frequently does? It seems absurd that Koontz has been slighted in this way, while other, far lesser-known writers have received an award. What's going on behind the doors and curtain of the HWA? Politics? Nepotism? Cronyism?




King has been declared, by a few promoters, as having eclipsed even Edgar Allan Poe as the best horror writer of all time. While it is undeniably true that King has written far more than Poe wrote, quantity is not the same as quality.

Popular with ordinary readers and with literary critics alike, Poe not only wrote superb horror stories, but he also popularized and greatly improved the horror story, at the same time introducing psychological horror, and he invented the detective story. Both accomplishments are nothing if not “superior achievements.” The invention of an entire genre alone is a peerless feat. In addition, while serving as de facto editors of important literary magazines, he wrote both book reviews and essays in literary criticism and established specific criteria for writing both poetry and short stories that are still influential to this day.




Had the HWA existed in Poe's day, he might have been a member—indeed, he might have been a founder—and he probably would have won Bram Stoker Awards for Short Fiction, Anthology, Poetry Collection, and Lifetime Achievement—and deservedly so.




If the HWA wants its award to become prestigious beyond its own membership, winners, and publishers, the association should adopt a few reforms. Specific criteria should be developed and published, and these standards should lean heavily toward literary excellence. William Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw, The Jolly Corner), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Twice-Told Tales), Edgar AllanPoe, Charles Dickens ("The Signal-man"), and other top-flight writers have, after all, written horror stories.

The awards should be occasional, rather than annual (“superior achievement” of any kind doesn't generally occur in a narrow field such as horror fiction, on a dependable, yearly basis).

The judges should be drawn from among scholars, literary critics, and professional book reviewers as well as HWA members. There's probably room for improving the processes for ballot inclusion and nomination, too.


Sarah Langan's Bram Stoker Awards

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


Publisher's Weekly's review of The Missing offers praise for Sarah 2007 Langan's novel, “a powerhouse creepfest that recalls, in the best way possible, the early work of Stephen King.” (Most critics and readers do find King's earlier fiction superior to his later work). The Missing also offers Langan's own take on the otherwise worn trope of the zombie: “Rather than stick to zombie lit convention (mindless undead, endless chases), Langan invests her plague with a sinister intelligence of unknown origin.”




She also offers somewhat subdued descriptions of the revenants, with “just enough horrific details to allow the truly gruesome scenes to play out unbound in the imagination,” a technique for generating terror, as opposed to horror. However, the reviewer considers the novel a “sophomore effort,” which suggests The Missing isn't quite the “superior achievement” required for a Bram Stoker Award, even if it did manage to beat such other nominees for the prize, including some veterans, as Bruce Boson (The Guardener's Tale), Stephen King's son and protege, Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box), Erika Mailman (The Witch's Trinity), and Dan Simmons (The Terror).




Langan scored another Bram Stoker Award win for her 2009 novel, Audrey's Door. Unfortunately, either the book 2009 reviews of the novel written are no longer available on the Internet or the award winner was passed over by professional critics. There are a few reviews of the book online, but none by established, recognized critics or national publications of record and repute.




Friday, June 22, 2018

Robert R. McCammon's Bram Stoker Awards

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


It's unclear how prestigious the Bram Stoker Award is beyond the Horror Writers Association (HWA), whose members bestow the prize to writers (mostly among their own ranks) for “superior achievement” in the genre. The prizes were first awarded, in a variety of categories, in 1987. Winners receive a statuette made by Society Awards, the same firm that makes the Emmy Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the GLAAD Media Award.

Four HWA members have won multiple Bram Stoker Awards for the novel.


Robert R. McCammon took home the Bram Stoker Award for Swan Song (1983), which tied with Stephen King's Misery; for Mine (1990); and for Boy's Life (1991).

In the absence of HWA specific criteria for determining who should and should not receive a Bram Stoker Award for his or her novel, we'll take a look, backward in time, in this post, to see how the critics of the day assessed McCammon's prize-winning novels. In a future post, we'll consider Sarah Langan's “superior accomplishment.”


Either the book reviews of Swan Song written in 1983, the year of the novel's publication, are no longer available on the Internet or the novel was passed over by professional critics. There are a few reviews of the book online, but none by established, recognized critics or national publications of record and repute, so we must pass on to McCammon's 1990 Bram Stoke Award winner, Mine.


The Kirkus Review of the novel, after recounting details of the plot, which includes a series of events more typical of the thriller than a horror novel (e. g., “a ferocious chase that features, among other over-the-top attractions, a blizzard, enraged pit bulls, homegrown surgery, a mutilated FBI agent on a rampage”—suggests that Boy's Life tries hard to be a winner, but left the reviewer somewhat unimpressed.

Despite the novel's delivery of “prime suspense and explosive payoffs,” which made Mine a “maximum overdrive, page-whipping thriller,” it lacks originality (“nothing new here”) and has a “completely predictable resolution.” There are action and suspense, but nothing to get excited about with regard to innovation or surprises. Sounds like a grade of “B-,” which certainly wouldn't qualify for the receipt of a prize for “superior achievement.” Besides, isn't the book more a thriller than a horror novel?

For Gene Lyons, the secret of Boy's Life success as a novel is its nostalgic revisiting of the past and its “naive and sentimental” storytelling. The plot is complex, Lyons suggests, and a little rough around the edges, a sort of unevenly sewn patchwork of plots and subplots, “enough . . . to fill a half-dozen ordinary novels.” Despite these flaws, Lyons assigns the novel an “A-,” characterizing it as a guilty pleasure adults will enjoy reading despite themselves.

However, he points out that the book isn't really a horror novel; it's more like an “autobiographical fantasy,” or what McCammon calls “fictography.” Again, if this book isn't a horror novel, why was it awarded a Bram Stoker Award? Only the Horror Writer Association's judges could answer that question, but they will say only that the award is bestowed upon a writer whose work exhibits “superior achievement,” which Boy's Life achieves, according to Lyons, at least, albeit only barely.

Kirkus Reviews also praises Boy's Life. It tells a rich, evocative story of childhood in the deep South, constituting an “idyll of small-town America—an idyll that McCammon paints with a score of bull's-eye details.” Both a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, and a murder mystery of sorts, and a hybrid story mixing realism with fantasy—there's not only “a raging flood, a shootout, a showdown with bullies—but also . . . [such] often darkly, magical wonders as . . . a living dinosaur; precognitive nightmares; [and] the grotesque life after death of Cory's dog.”

Despite the novel's “few false notes,” the reviewer sees it as being on par with Stephen King's and ray Bradbury's “childhood-elegies,” but cautions prospective readers about the novel's “jarringly melodramatic climax.”

Although the Kirkus Review reviewer doesn't grade the book, as Lyons did, it seems likely, had a grade been awarded, it would have been an “A-” or a “B+,” as, overall, the assessment is much more positive than negative. For the sake of argument, then, let's say that Boy's Life does reflect the “superior achievement” that the HWA claims is the basis—the sole basis, perhaps—for winning the Bram Stoker Award for Novel. So far, of the thirteen books we've considered, only one seems to merit the HWA's award for “superior achievement,” which equates to just over seven percent.



Thursday, June 21, 2018

Peter Straub's Bram Stoker Awards


Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


It's unclear how prestigious the Bram Stoker Award is beyond the Horror Writers Association (HWA), whose members bestow the prize to writers (mostly among their own ranks) for “superior achievement” in the genre. The prizes were first awarded, in a variety of categories, in 1987. Winners receive a statuette made by Society Awards, the same firm that makes the Emmy Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the GLAAD Media Award.

Four HWA members have won multiple Bram Stoker Awards for the novel.

The award was conferred on Peter Straub for The Throat (1993); Mr. X (1999); Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003); In the Night Room (2004); and A Dark Matter (2010).



In the absence of HWA criteria for determining who should and should not receive a Bram Stoker Award for his or her novel, we'll take a look, backward in time, in this post, to see how the critics of the day assessed Straub's prize-winning novels. In a future post, we'll consider the "superior accomplishment" of Sarah Langan, the remaining multiple Bram Stoker Award winner.



According to the 1993 book review “Peter Straub —The Throat” which appears on the Dead End Follies website, The Throat concludes the Blue Rose Trilogy, which started with the 1988 novel Koko and was continued in the 1990 sequel, Mystery. The anonymous reviewer writes, “What makes it different than other mystery novels is that Peter Straub juxtaposes Tim Underhill's personal trauma suffered during Vietnam war to Millhaven's deep-rooted, collective haunting,” not much of which will make sense unless readers have already read “at least Koko.” 

The Throat is also unusual, the reviewer says, because “it subverts the . . . war/soldiers relationship common to most novels and makes it come off as an aberration of human nature which only makes victims.” Meanwhile, each novel, considered separately, is “intricate” and “engaging,” albeit “thematically unambitious,” in its presentation of a mystery.

Although Straub calls the three books a trilogy, the reviewer can't help wondering whether Koko and Mystery actually derive from The Throat. If so, Straub's apparent attempt to create “a mythical character” out of Tom Pasmore “kind of works.” Whether or not The Throat and the rest of the trilogy (if it is a trilogy) should be considered a “superior achievement,” the reviewer isn't sure, finding “these books a little mainstream-sih,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

The reviewer seems to suggest that Straub has a better-than-average idea, but his execution of it doesn't quite come off, in which case we must wonder whether one of the competitors for the 1993 Bram Stoker Award—Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, Bradley Denton (Blackburn), Poppy Z. Brite (Drawing Blood), or Bentley Little (The Summoning)should have won the honors.

Bob Pastorella is more enthusiastic in singing Straub's praises in “Tattered Tomes: The Throat by Peter Straub.” It's an epic look inside a labyrinth. Rather than being the “bloated, overwritten, thriller that needs a good edit” other reviewers have claimed it to be, the trilogy is a masterpiece in which “every single word matters.”

The books present an “incredible” cast of characters, all of whom are essential to the story; “lengthy yet pertinent flashbacks” that affect the story being told in the present, and ghosts that are, as The Throat's Walter Dragonette explains, “dead people . . . just like you and me,” (except that you and I aren't dead). They're motivated by desires, “miss being alive,” and are extremely sensitive and perceptive, their lack of sensory organs notwithstanding. Ghosts who are more human than the living? The concept, which is central to The Throat and the rest of the trilogy, seems not so much innovative as asinine, especially for an “epic” read.



How did Mr. X fare with the critics of its day? The Kirkus Review seems to see it as a pastiche constructed of other writers' earlier works, with bits of H. P. Lovecraft, pieces of Stephen King, and scraps of Shirley Jackson scattered throughout his lengthy tale. There's also an assortment of familiar tropes:

Twins separated at birth, antiquarians and poltergeists, a plucky love interest whose own family harbors dark secrets, a fiery climax straight out of the early Frankenstein movies, and a denouement offering no fewer than three turns of the screw: Straub doesn’t miss a trick, or omit a cliché peculiar to the genre. Overlong and sometimes embarrassingly lurid, though more often than not quite entertaining. Not by any means Straub’s most accomplished work . . . .

Which leaves us with the question (perhaps we misunderstood): Isn't the Bram Stoker Award for Novel supposed to go to an author whose work represents an “superior achievement” in the horror genre?



Kirkus Review also sees Lost Boy, Lost Girl as flawed, rather than suggestive of “superior achievement.” The novel's mystery, Straub's forte—or his signature, at any rate—in the horror genre, involves such “ingredients,” the reviewer says, as “a suburban mom’s suicide, a spooky abandoned house, and a teenager’s unwitting pursuit of the truth” concerning a serial killer, all of which are well and good enough in their own way; the problem with the book is its execution. The plot is “circuitous,” breaking “apart into alternations of present action with flashbacks, experienced and relayed through various characters’ viewpoints, Tim’s “journal,” and an omniscient narrative voice only intermittently firmly distinguished from Tim’s own.”

The result of this fragmented and disjointed narrative technique is to destroy the story's unity and what Edgar Allan Poe describes as “totality of effect.” There are also a few incidents and circumstances that strain readers' suspension of disbelief and a creepy insistence upon teenage Mark's “stunning good looks.” The resolution, which implies that fictional characters “have assumed lethal form,” is yet another borrowing, it appears, this time from Straub's sometimes-collaborator, Stephen King's 1993 novel, The Dark Half.

When writing epics, trilogies, and 368-page stand-alone novels, one can use all the help he can get. Is Lost Boy, Lost Girl a “superior achievement” or is Straub just getting by with a little help from his friends? Did it deserve to win over Darker than Night by Owl Goingback, Hannibal by Thomas Harris, Low Men in Yellow Coats by Stephen King, and Hexes by Tom Piccirilli?



A Kirkus Review 2004 book review of Peter Straub's In the Night Room (2004) was kinder to the author than the Lost Boy, Lost Girl reviewer, finding the former book, a sequel to the latter novel, a better read. For readers who enjoy recurring heroes and multi-volume tales, In the Night Roommight be entertaining. There's even a ghost and an angel in the mix.Those who find recurring characters and protracted plots tedious might agree with the reviewer: “Straub can still tease the imagination and chill the blood with the best of them. But it’s probably time to bury Tim Underhill, and move on.”

Although this review is kinder and gentler than other, concerning Straub's other works, have been, it doesn't seem to suggest that In the Night Room is in any way a “superior achievement.” Even so, it is presumably better than the other novels nominated for the 2004 prize. After all, In the Night Room was the winner; the rest (P. D. Cacek [The Wild Caller], Stephen King [The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower], and Michael Laimo [Deep in the Darkness] were losers.


Straub's fifth Bram Stoker Award was presented to him for his novel A Dark Matter (2010). Lacking the specific standards, if any, the Horror Writers Association (HWA) uses to judge the merits of the novels for which they award authors the Bram Stoker Award, we must turn, once again, to a professional book reviewer's judgment of the merits of the novel. This time, Maureen Corrigan does the honors in her review, “'Dark Matter' by Peter Straub,” which was published in The Washington Post on Monday, February 8, 2010. 

Like reviewers of Straub's other works, Corrigan likes Straub's idea—a cult of hippies perform an occult rite, opening the gates of hell—but has a problem with the author's execution of it:

Motivated in part by a desperate desire to overcome writer's block and, perhaps, publish a book based on the event, he [are we talking about Straub or one of his characters here?] decides to investigate by reconnecting with the far-flung survivors of Mallon's mysterious ritual. He wants to hear each of their separate accounts of that night. And so that event is repeated, reinterpreted and revisited throughout the novel.

And that's the big problem: The central story seems too fright-fest-boilerplate to be worthy of such extended rumination. Doesn't the mystic-on-the-make always lose control of the black magic he's unleashed? Isn't it always a bad idea to sign up for one of these Outward Bound Adventures into Another Dimension? Doesn't someone always lose her mind or soul or life? In offering each of the aging student survivors a separate turn at recalling that night's horror, Straub seems to be trying to one-up his own rather mundane story line.

Along the way, Corrigan suggests, Straub's narrative falls apart to the point that, “by the end of 'A Dark Matter,' it hardly matters anymore whether the wan mystery of What Happened in the Meadow That Night has been solved.” Doesn't sound much like “superior achievement.




On the other hand, maybe Straub's competitors' novels really were worse and those of Stephen King's son, Joe Hill (Horns) Jonathan Maberry's Rot and Ruin, Linda Watanabe McFerrin's Dead Love, Joe McKinney's Apocalypse of the Dead, and Jeff Strand's Dweller. Even so, the award isn't supposed to be for the best novel, but for superior achievement. 

Is A Dark Matter in any way a "superior achievement"? Without specific standards and a few comments of explanation from the judges of the contest, it's hard to say. What we can be sure of, though, is that, had the professional reviewers we tapped for this exercise been on the panel of judges evaluating Straub's novels, it's likely that none of them would have voted in favor of his receiving a Bram Stoker Award. Rather than finding his novels to reflect “superior achievement,” most of our reviewers have considered them to be mediocre at best.



Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Stephen King's Bram Stoker Awards

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

It's unclear how prestigious the Bram Stoker Award is beyond the Horror Writers Association (HWA), whose members bestow the prize to writers (mostly among their own ranks) for “superior achievement” in the genre. The prizes were first awarded, in a variety of categories, in 1987. Winners receive a statuette made by Society Awards, the same firm that makes the Emmy Award, the Golden Globe Award, and the GLAAD Media Award.




Four HWA members have won multiple Bram Stoker Awards for the novel.

Stephen King won for Misery (1987), tying with Robert R, McCammon, the author of Swan Song; for The Green Mile (1996); for Bag of Bones (1998); for Lisey's Story (2006); for Duma Key (2008); and for Doctor Sleep (2013).

The award was conferred on Peter Straub for The Throat (1993); Mr. X (1999); Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003); In the Night Room (2004); and A Dark Matter (2010).

Robert R. McCammon took home the Bram Stoker Award for Swan Song (1983), which tied with King's Misery; for Mine (1990); and for Boy's Life (1991).

The prize went to Sarah Langan for The Missing (2007) and Audrey's Door (2009).

In the absence of specific HWA criteria for determining who should and should not receive a Bram Stoker Award for his or her novel, we'll take a look, backward in time, in this post, to see how the critics of the day assessed King's prize-winning novels. In future posts, we'll consider the other multiple award winners' “superior accomplishments.”

While the HWA's secret criteria for determining “superior achievement” appear to vary from one HWA member to another (candidates for inclusion on ballots in votes for nominations are made both by members and, on a separate ballot, by judges), Amazon customers' reviews give a pretty good idea why readers rate the books they review. Interestingly, Amazon customers apparently often disagree with HWA's assessments of the Bram Stoker Award winners' “superior achievement” in the genre.




We may never know what's “superior” about King's achievement in having written Misery, but, whatever it was deemed to have been, it was enough for him to be awarded one of the two 1987 prizes for such accomplishment with regard to the novel. The best we can do, perhaps, in attempting to surmise what the HWA organization found to be of “superior” quality concerning King's novel, is to recall what a professional critic wrote about it.

Here's what John Katzenbach of The New York Times had to say, in part, about the novel in his May 31, 1987, review, “Summer Reading: Sheldon Gets the Ax.” The novel is “different” from others of its genre in that it has a limited cast of characters (two, in fact) and a restricted setting (“the confines of a single house”—indeed, almost exclusively . . . one room”). (Has Katzenbach ever read Edgar Allan Poe's “The Cask of Amontillado” or “The Tell-Tale Heart”?)

In addition, Katzenbach finds King's implicit allusions to The Arabian Nights “sophisticated” storytelling: “But the novel functions as well on a more sophisticated level. Mr. King evokes the image of Scheherazade.” The critic also enjoys King's characterizations of protagonist Paul Sheldon and his psychotic nemesis, Annie Wilkes, the novelist's suggestion “that real torture can solve the problems of writer's block,” and its many cliffhangers.

Again, we have no idea what went through the minds of the HWA judges who decided Misery was an example of “superior achievement” in the horror genre, but, if Katzenbach provides any insight, such accomplishment has a lot to do with rehashing elements as old, or older than, Poe; suggesting an allusion to another, older work of literature; writing characters interesting to one's readers (fairly standard); and evoking an unusual—one might say, in the case of Misery's idea that torture is inspiring, an absurd—theme. Oh, yes, Kazenbach likes King's “cliffhangers,” too.

Although the techniques Katzenbach zeroes in on are typical of the genre, exhibiting nothing truly “different” in horror fiction, King's apparently virtuoso performance topped those of Ray Garton (Live Girls), Kevin Nunn (Unassigned Territory), and Chet Williamson (Ash Wednesday), and was matched only by Robert R. McCammon (Swan Song), who shared the 1987 Bram Stoker Award for the novel. It seems Katzenbach, like King's readers and the HWA itself, is easily impressed.




What about The Green Mile (1996)? What made this particular novel a “superior achievement” worthy of the HWA prize for what is essentially the best horror novel of the year? We don't know for sure, of course, given the association's tight-lipped stance on divulging its criteria—at least online—so, again, the best we can do is to get the take of a professional critic of the day.

In his book review of King's prison horror story for Entertainment Weekly, “The Green Mile (Entire),” Tom De Haven says that, having read the introductory chapter of the novel, which was serialized, he was “hooked” by the many questions it raised. Raising questions, it seems, was King's biggest ploy in maintaining readers' suspense:

Is Coffey innocent? I don’t know. Just as I don’t know what happens to the other prisoner on death row, a timid Frenchman named Eduard Delacroix, who has befriended a small brown mouse with an eerily unrodentlike intelligence. Nor do I know what mayhem vicious prison guard Percy Wetmore is going to inflict. (He’s going to do something, though. Bet on it.) Is this going to turn into a gore story or a ghost story? Or both? I don’t know that, either.  

Although the reviewer has read only the first installment, he ventures the opinion that “King has written — so far — his best fiction in years, a Depression-era prison novel that’s as hauntingly touching as it is just plain haunted.” In fact, De Haven gives King's first chapter an “A” grade. 

To the impressive list of plot cliches, the use of literary allusions, characterization, abundant cliffhangers, and a dubious theme, we can now add to King's repertoire his ability to raise suspenseful questions. In fact, this last technique is the primary one De Haven credits for “hooking” him. Is it enough to build a novel on? At the time he wrote his single-installment book review, even De Haven couldn't say for sure, but, apparently for the HWA, whose judges, hopefully, read more, this was enough to designate King's work as one of “superior achievement” in the field. No wonder The Green Mile beat out Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse, Owl Goingback's Crota, and Peter Straub's The Hellfire Club.




Although Jim Argendeli (“Once again, Stephen King delivers”) says that Bag of Bones is “standard fare for a Stephen King novel,” he also finds the book “business as usual” and full of “cliches.” Its saving grace, Argendeli implies, is King's ability to suggest questions by which he maintains readers' suspense.

Apparently, there is nothing new here, either, as De Haven mentions this trick as one that's been in King's bag at least as early as 1996 and, in fact, suggesting questions through incidents and other means is as old as fiction itself, as are the “plot twists” and “red herrings” that Argendeli singles out as responsible for keeping “you rapidly turning the pages to discover the answers” to the questions King has implied.

Was King's use of ancient literary techniques and “business as usual” enough to make Bag of Bones the winner of the HWA's 1998 Bram Stoker Award for Novel? If so, it's difficult to see how his performance in having written Bag of Bones represents “superior achievement” and why it won over Dean Koontz's Fear Nothing, S. P. Somtow's Darker Angels, and Thomas Tessier's Fog Heart.




For The New York Times reviewer Jim Windolf (“Scare Tactician”), King's 1998 Bram Stower Award winner, Lisey's Story, succeeds where “its fraternal twin,” Bag of Bones, failed because the former novel's characters, “Lisey and Scott make much better novel subjects than their 'Bag of Bones' counterparts,” being “loopy and dramatic,” rather than, as in Bag of Bones, simply chewing “up creaky plot machinery.”

A novel that investigates who an author is while he (the author in Lisey's Story is male) is writing, doesn't merely have intriguing (i. e., “loopy and dramatic”) characters, but it's also chock full of “solid descriptions . . . indelible images . . .” interrupted sentences, italics, alternating points of view, and even verse.

Haven't other writers used the same devices for centuries? There seems to be nothing, in Windolf's catalog of King's “tricks” that set King apart from those of his peers who lost the 1998 Bram Stoker Award for Novel to him. The reason Lisey's Story is a winner, in the eyes of HWA's judges, remains a mystery.




In 2008, King won the HWA's Bram Stoker Award for Novel yet again, this time for Duma Key. Why was this novel considered a “superior achievement” in the field of horror fiction while the losing contenders—Gary Braunbeck's Coffin County, Nate Kenyon's The Reach, and Gregory Lamberson's Johnny Gruesomewere judged as inferior works?

In “Dark Art,” New York Times book reviewer, James Campbell, sings the praises of King's Duma Key, despite King's inability to meet the challenge of describing paintings in words: “The difficulty of evoking the wonder of graphic art that cannot be viewed has confounded many writers before King.”

Although the novel's painter, Edgar Freemantle, thinks of his own works as “reheated Dalí,” Campbell finds it “hard to square that comparison with the descriptions of four [of the character's] recent works,” one of which King, via Freemantle, describes as “a dead seagull . . . found on the beach,” which Freemantle then magnified to “pterodactyl size.” (Either King doesn't think much of Dalí or he hadn't seen many of the surrealist's paintings, if he confuses Dalí's work with that of Freemantle.) If it's not King's poor descriptions, perhaps it was his “overextended” plotting or “flimsy” characterization that endeared Duma Key to the HWA judges.




In 2013, King's novel Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining (1977), won the Bram Stoker Award for Novel. There's no telling why the HWA judges judged this novel as being worthy to receive King's seventh such award, but Margaret Atwood's review of the novel, “Shine On: Stephen King's 'Shining' Sequel, 'Doctor Sleep',” suggests some reasons the book may have been recommended. 

It's full of “wordplay and puns and mirror language,” she notes; it offers a mix of good and bad in each character; it includes “all [the] virtues of his best work” (namely, he knows his way around “the underworld”); his fiction connects with (feeds upon?) earlier American literature (especially earlier horror stories), and it's “about families” (but, of course, not all of the families are human).

For Atwood, King is the Norman Rockwell of American letters, stemming from the same “literary taproot” that runs through the literature of Edgar Nathaniel Hawthorne, Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Ray Bradbury. King may not be the “Lincoln of our Literature,” as William Dean Howells called Mark Twain, but, hey, it's all food. Good enough, at least, for the HWA to have awarded King his sixth Bram Stoker prize.



Scholars may contend, as Dr. Harold Bloom certainly does, that King writes nothing more than the modern equivalents of Victorian “penny dreadfuls,” but what does the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University know?

Whom are we to believe, the HWA, or Bloom, who, in writing of the bestowal of a different award on King, evaluates the horror author's contributions to American letters this way:

The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for “distinguished contribution” to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J. K. Rowling (“Dumbing down American readers”).


Thursday, March 11, 2010

Horror Trilogies: Not Quite Triptychs

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

A trilogy is a three-part series of novels, each of which tells a separate story, intelligible in itself, but which also, collectively, make up a longer, continuous narrative that is unified by various elements, such as the same cast of characters, the same settings, and the same or similar themes.

Perhaps one of the better known modern trilogies is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast is also a well-known fantasy trilogy. Trilogies are relatively rare among horror novels.

The Pine Deep Trilogy, by Jonathan Maberry, is such a series, however. It focuses upon the “Most Haunted Town in America,” the futuristic Pine Deep, Pennsylvania. The trilogy’s title volumes are Ghost Road Blues, devoted to the pursuit of serial killer Karl Ruger, who is attracted to Pine Deep by the ancient evil that resides thereabout; Dead Man’s Song (2007); and Bad Moon Rising (2008). The initial volume won the 2006 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, the horror genre’s highest prize.

The plot?

Thirty years before the opening of the series’ present-day story, Oren Morse, a traveling field hand and blues musician whom the community’s children nickname the “Bone Man,” kills Ubel Griswold, a werewolf who’d been terrorizing Pine Deep. Local racists, blaming Morse for Griswold’s killings, murder Morse. Fifteen years later, Griswold’s spirit awakens, and, assisted by Vic Wingate, the werewolf seeks revenge upon Pine Deep.

Among those whom Morse saved was nine-year old Malcolm Crow, who now owns a craft store based upon a Halloween theme. His fiancé, Val Guthrie, is also a survivor of the original massacre. Their friend, Pine Deep’s mayor, Terry Wolfe, suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of his sister’s having been murdered (and his own near murder) by Griswold.

In Ghost Road Blues, Ruger attacks Val and her family again. Wingate’s adopted son, Mike Sweeney, who dreams of confronting various evils, is targeted by Tow-Truck Eddie after “God” tells Eddie that Mike is the antichrist. In reality, “God’s” voice is that of Griswold.

In Dead Man’s Song, Crow and local newsman Willard Fowler Newton, research the events of thirty years ago, while Wingate and Ruger assemble an army of the undead for Griswold to command during the “Red Wave,” a massive attack on Halloween night. While Crow and Newton visit Dark Hollow, where Griswold had both lived and died, one of Ruger’s companions, Boyd, becomes a vampire and Griswold’s ghost sets a trap for Crow, as Wingate sends Boyd after Val.

In Bad Moon Rising, Crow and his friends learn the truth concerning their foes, just as the Red Wave is about to get underway.

The formula for Maberry’s trilogy is simple, but effective:
1. An ancient evil returns.
2. The ancient evil repeats its atrocities.
3. Armed with knowledge concerning the ancient evil, the protagonist combats it.
Another trilogy by a well-known writer who has written horror fiction in the past and still dabbles in the genre on occasion is Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein series: Prodigal Son, co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson (2004), City of Night, co-authored with Ed Gorman (2005), and Dead and Alive (2009). (Now we know, I guess, how "Koontz" manages to write so many novels so quickly; he has more help than just his handful of psuedonyms.)

Dead Souls (2010) launches a second trilogy on the same theme.

Koontz, whose plots are often recycled and derivative of his own previous work and the works of others, is at least making no bones about such redundancies in the writing and co-writing of these trilogies.

In Koontz’s Frankenstein update, Victor Frankenstein, now going by the name Victor Helios, has set up shop, so to speak, in New Orleans, where he uses synthetic biology to create a new race of androids as replacements for the human race, much to the chagrin of his nemeses, police detectives, Carson O’Connor and Michael Madison, and his original monster, who is now known as Deucalion. The new creatures’ personalities are downloaded directly into their brains through the wonders of computer technology.

The plot?

In Prodigal Son, O’Connor and Madison pursue a serial killer dubbed “The Surgeon.” Attracted by the killer’s serial murders, Frankenstein’s monster believes that his creator has somehow returned.

In City of Night, the detectives team up with the monster to stop Helios and the army of programmed android killers that Helios has unleashed upon New Orleans.

In Dead and Alive, the series’ grand finale takes place as Deucalion leads the hordes of his master’s creatures against Helios himself in a confrontation that is part showdown and part revenge. Koontz, however, hints at the sequel that is to launch his second Frankenstein series. After all, there’s gold in them thar monsters.

The formula for Koontz’s trilogy is simple, but effective:
1. An ancient evil returns.
2. The ancient evil repeats its atrocities.
3. Armed with knowledge concerning the ancient evil, the protagonist combats it.
The formula for both Maberry’s and Koontz’s trilogies suggest that Stephen King’s It could have been a trilogy; at over 1,000 pages, it is certainly long enough to have been broken into three installments, in which the first, the second, and the third, respectively, would present a plot in which--
1. An ancient evil returns.
2. The ancient evil repeats its atrocities.
3. Armed with knowledge concerning the ancient evil, the protagonist combats it.
Wait! Isn’t that also the plot of King’s Desperation? And of Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night? And of Bentley Little’s The Resort? And. . . .mmm. . . it seems we may be onto something here (maybe the reason there are comparatively so few horror novel trilogies).

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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